The Fifth Star - Chapter 5 (1/2) - Broken Vow

If it weren’t for the regular visits of the mage whose name she’d learned was Darius, Sparrow would have had no idea how much time passed in her cell. The light was supplied by a mere few torches, and their usually welcome glow did not make the place feel warmer, but somehow the opposite; the orange tint cast over the stone floors and walls only served to make it feel dirtier, more morose with the flickering shadows they cast. Not that it wouldn’t have been filthy enough without their assistance. There was only one item within her cell, a chamberpot, apparently neglected by the previous occupant in favour of messing in one of the corners – a last act of defiance against their captors, maybe, she thought – the result of which was never washed away. A pile of hay that reeked of mold was the only surface that seemed to be meant to sleep upon, but she was in no hurry to test it. Only one corner of the miniscule cage was suitable for her, and barely at that, but at the least it allowed her to stay at the back wall, away from the jailor.

While the smell and filth was enough to keep her from resting, just the sound alone would have managed easily. There had been only a handful of silent moments thus far, each so short-lived as to have not existed at all before some fellow inmate felt the need to fill it, whether with a moan, scream, or even a manic laugh that hinted at the insanity this prison had caused its utterer. Sparrow hadn’t even yet allowed herself the use of the aforementioned chamberpot, for each time she talked herself into the unrelished necessity of it the man in the cell next to her’s took a keen interest in her doings, frightening her all over again, and her bladder was becoming quickly unbearable in its urging.

The first meal she’d been offered was brought to her just then, slid noisily under the bars of her cell, but when she scrambled for it just the sight of the meager offering put her off. Half a bowl of thin, watery gruel that looked more like something a person ejected from their stomach than put into it was all the meal she’d been given. She sighed sadly and pushed the bowl back through where it came from and returned to her corner, her stomach grumbling ruefully.

The jailor came by a few minutes later to collect the waiting line of empty bowls in the aisle, and he paused outside her cell to take note of her untouched portion. His tongue clicked in mocking pity as he stooped to retrieve it. “Not good enough for your likes, eh? Maybe we should see how you like it if I just… forget to bring you a few meals?”

Sparrow didn’t answer. I’ve gone far longer than this, she thought, if you think it’ll be that easy to make me beg, you’ve got another thing coming. Another painful spasm erupted from her bladder. Unable to tolerate it any longer, she waited only long enough for the guard to walk away before she steeled herself and jerked her dress up, squatting over the too-small pot. Her neighbour, of course, noticed this and stared at her unwaveringly the whole while she relieved herself, but she refused to let the stranger get the better of her, staring back with what she hoped came across as an intimidating glare.

People came and went from the dungeons with a frequency that surprised her. The jailor changed over to another shift, and several different guards came to pay visits to prisoners that she was sure were not congenial affairs – more than once a man was removed from his cell and taken further down the hallway, his destination not visible from her own location, and then returned later much the worse for wear with evidence of torture written all over him. One did not return at all when his interrogator did; he came later, his lifeless form dragged down the entire hall to the single exit, leaving a partially congealed blood trail in his wake. She shuddered as the body passed, and was innately grateful that, from what Darius had told her, such a horrific fate was not in her future.

However she did not look forward to what little she knew was coming instead. The reputation of the College was dark, but ever unclear, and it was impossible to tell truth from fabrication by the myriad rumours people spread. She’d heard many things – that mages were tortured to potentiate their magic, that once a person left they would never see their families again, that when man became mage they destroyed that which made them human, and even that they used blood sacrifices to fuel their darker arts – but she had to discount this all in her mind as untrue, for it was just too much to process otherwise.

She kept to herself in the same lonely corner, now finding herself looking forward to Darius’s next visit. Who was he, that he seemed to show her some measure of respect and kindness where none else had? Why had he subtly impressed upon her that he was not bound by the same rules as the other people employed in the castle? And why, most importantly, did he seem to care at all? It ate at her, not knowing, but she could not simply ask him. It could all just be an act, a trap to catch her speaking treason against the Valterian Empire – and if he was genuine, he’d not be able to answer her questions with so many ears about to overhear.

When enough time seemed to have passed that Sparrow felt she could expect the mysterious mage’s visit, she watched the door to the dungeon expectantly. So when another face she recognized entered the dreary place, her heart skipped a beat as the identity registered.

“Rhin!” she cried out, darting across the tiny space to press herself against the bars, one arm reaching out for her oldest and dearest friend. Though it had been seven years since she last set eyes upon him, she could not have forgotten him if she tried. His eyes, like pools of molten chocolate, gazed out from under the same strong brows as before, his face framed by those same dirty blonde waves of hair, which shone when the light caught it just so. The years had changed him for a certainty though, evident just by the way he carried himself. He’d always possessed the troubled look of someone forced to fend for themselves too early, but now she could see, quite curiously, both sadness and a confidence he’d not had before.

To her surprise, Rhin did not greet her with the same enthusiasm. He strolled over to her cell, in no apparent rush, and stopped just past the reach of her arm. “Hello, Sparrow,” he greeted her with a small smile, but it hardly touched his eyes, and she could tell immediately that something was amiss.

She withdrew her hand, seeing that he was not about to take it in his own. What’s the matter with him? “Rhin, I…” she had so much to say to him, but the words froze on her lips. So many times she’d dreamt of their reunion, laid out each and every detail in her mind like a maiden planning a grandiose wedding. Now reality was already falling short of her expectations, and combined with his seeming disinterest, a response eluded her. “I missed you so much,” she managed to choke out, tears of joy and sorrow combined welling up in her vision.

The hard look in his formerly so kind eyes softened a bit. “I missed you too,” he told her. But he said nothing else, and the silence between them grew longer and longer, until Sparrow felt she would die just from the tension.

“Why?” she asked of him, when she could bear it no longer. It was only part of what she wanted to say – the full question being ‘why did you never come back to me?’ – but her throat was dry and uncooperative, and it seized on the words.

He understood the unspoken. “There are… many reasons.”

His evasive answer gave her enough strength to persist. “Then give me at least one. I think I deserve to know why you broke your promise.”

Rhin looked away from her, and with her question worded thusly, it seemed to shame him into honesty. “I wanted to return, I really did,” he started. “I thought that after my three years of service, I would have enough coin to buy us a better life. But I didn’t, and what point would there have been in coming home just to struggle as before? I remember thinking, ‘what’s another three years, when that has already passed so quickly? Sparrow will be busy, and if she wasn’t going to lose interest by now, what’s a bit longer, when the payoff would be living the rest of our lives without poverty?’”

Sparrow shook her head in denial. “What you’ve said, that’s very noble of you,” she agreed, “however, you’re leaving out a pretty important detail. Three Homecomings have passed since you left, not two. The first was too soon of course, and the second you’ve explained. But why did you not return on the last? Were you planning, then, to make me wait nine years without a word?”

“By then,” Rhin defended himself, “I didn’t know if I could face you. With the lack of news you’d have heard from me… and what it is that you do…”

“With what I do?!” she exclaimed belligerently, “You knew perfectly well before you made that vow what was to be expected of me. If the thought of another man betwixt my legs bothered you so much-”

“That doesn’t matter now,” he sharply interrupted her beginning tirade with a frown. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But you managed to fill the role I left behind, so why are you quite so inconsolable?”

Her anger began to diminish as confusion replaced it. “What do you mean, I filled it? If you mean by my job which you find so repugnant, I assure you, I take no pleasure from it.”

“No,” Rhin declined with a slow sway of his head, “don’t try to cover for him. Raven already told me.”

No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t discern what he meant. “What are you on about, Rhin?”

“Your lover, of course.”

“I haven’t got one.”

Now he seemed truly frustrated with her, dramatically throwing his hands up in the air. “Of course you’d deny it now! Why can’t you just tell me the truth?”

“I am!” she protested, “Raven must have lied to you.”

“And why would she do that? What possible benefit would she gain?”

Sparrow opened her mouth to snap back at him, to throw an explanation for this at him that he could not refute – but none rose to her mind. Why had Raven lied to him so?

Rhin took her silence as confirmation. “Exactly. There is no reason, because it’s true, isn’t it?” He looked ready to burst, his face becoming quickly flushed with the blood that rose beneath its surface.

“Rhin…” she whimpered, her grief apparent. She knew there would be no convincing him of the fabrication.

“Save it,” he spat at her, and she reflected again how much the years had altered him. Never before would he have spoken to her like this. “Even if you had no lover waiting for you, tomorrow you’ll be sent off to become a mage.” The word came out like a curse, a damnation of everything implied in the title.

“Surely, you can’t hold that against me. It’s not like the Seers gave me a choice.”

“I don’t expect they did, but we’ll see just how faithful your friend remains in five years time, when you return from the College a different person.”

Sparrow wanted to remark on the hypocrisy there, where he had been the one who changed so much, but the statement hit her like a kick in the stomach. Darius had never said it would be so long, and the prospect of such extended confinement set her heart to fluttering madly; she did not let it show, however, as hard as it was to conceal. It seemed Rhin was no longer on her side, and who knew what details he would take back to his masters, and what they would read from them? He had always been so cheerful, a light in the darkness of her childhood, and she thought once again of how seven years had changed everything, how the omnipresent Empire had managed, yet again, to ruin another aspect of her life. But then something about the years clicked…

“Rhin, how are you even here?” she asked, “The next Homecoming isn’t for another two years…”

“Failed to mention that, did I?” he smirked, waving a hand over himself to indicate his body as a whole, drawing her attention to the clothing that adorned it. Only now did she note Emperor Tibori’s crest, a red gryphon against a sable backing, stitched with painstaking detail upon the doublet. “I was knighted, Sparrow. You’d have wanted for nothing if you’d only had the patience.”

“Congratulations,” she uttered in a monotone that spoke of her lack of enthusiasm. Rhin had always harboured resentment for the Empire, as everyone forced to live in the worst districts of Lothan did. Before his sixteenth year he’d often spoken of joining the Fifth Star to avoid conscription, but he’d lacked the contacts, and ran out of time to find one before the soldiers came for him. Now there was no chance of his future changing; his knighting would have him firmly seated on the Empire’s side. It would take far more incentive than she could ever offer to remove him from that – for someone who’d had to fight just to survive for so long, the power and wealth would be too much to give up, their combined pull stronger than a siren’s song of myth.

If he sensed the inherent sarcasm in her comment, he ignored it. “Didn’t come without a price though,” he told her as he pulled at the bottom edge of the doublet, “one that someone of your kind delivered.”

As he exposed his abdomen to her, Sparrow couldn’t help the quiet hissing sound that escaped her as she looked upon his scarred flesh with a wince. The damage extended from his ribs to his pelvis, all newly healed flesh in shades of purple and red. She saw Rhin’s expression darken at her reaction, most like mistaking it for one of disgust. “What happened?” she asked, trying to keep her tone as genuinely interested as possible despite the anger she felt towards him.

Rhin jerked the doublet back down. “There was a rogue mage in one of the villages my company visited. He attacked my general, and I took a fireball meant for him in his defense.”

“That was very brave,” she acknowledged. She wasn’t sure what else there was to say.

“You know, when they told me I would find you down here,” he said with a disappointed shake of his head, “I was hoping they were mistaken, that there was some other woman in this cell. How can it be that you, of all people, hold such evil? If you’d committed some crime, mayhaps I could have used my position to get you out of it, but this…”

“I’m not evil, Rhin. I’m still Sparrow, just as you remember.”

Rhin inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, and let it out in one great sigh. “All magic is evil.”

“But not when your comrades use it to their advantage?” she challenged, hurt that he could so easily discount their past.

“That’s different,” he argued back, “How can the Empire hope to protect its people from magic, without using it themselves? No, the magi are a tool, a means to an end, and nothing more.”

Sparrow shook her head sadly. He was set in his course, and there was no point in trying to dissuade him from such notions. “I don’t believe that. All people have value. Once, you would have agreed with me, rather than let the Empire’s men influence you.” Without saying anything else to him, she turned away and retreated to her corner, settling down with her back to the bars this time rather than against the wall. She didn’t hear him walk away.

“I’m sorry, Sparrow, but I’ve chosen my path. Goodbye,” his voice carried to her, and as the tears she’d been holding back spilled over her face she picked up the faint sound of his boots scuffling over the stone floors. Only when she heard the dungeon’s door slam closed did she allow herself to fully break down, sobbing into her arms. Her breath came in ragged gasps that choked her and shook her to the core, and it seemed there was naught she could do to stop the crashing waves of despair that threatened to drown her.

So preoccupied was she with the loss of someone she could never have imagined betraying her so, Sparrow did not even take note of Darius’s return. There were many obvious indicators; his voice at the door as the jailor permitted his entry, his footsteps outside her cell, the key turning in the lock as he admitted himself to the same… all of them were reduced to mere background noise until the tentative touch of a hand on her shoulder startled her, cutting off her tears, but she was too weary to scream out her surprise.

She looked up at him, crouching not a foot away from her, and saw so much concern writ there it was nearly enough to set her off again. “What happened? Did someone hurt you?” he whispered to her, casting a suspicious glance over his shoulder at the jailor.

“In a manner of speaking,” she choked out, “none of the guards, though.”

He looked near ready to rip someone apart as he asked, “Who?”

Sparrow shook her head. “I doubt you know him,” she explained, wiping her face roughly with her sleeve, “he’s an… old friend, and newly knighted.”

“Sir Rhinlead?”

“Is that his name, now?” she barely managed to whisper, before a second tide of sorrow choked her like the first, stealing her breath away.